The degree of depletion of natural resources, including air, water and agricultural soil (what a paradox: our materialistic age is destroying matter), the increasing social and economic instability and misery everyone can observe makes it absolutely urgent that we change something.

Current science and technology do not deal with morality and ethics. They deal with theories, objects and machines; they view living beings as machines WITH AN EVER INCREASING overall disrespect for people.

The fear is that if humans regard themselves as machines, a very dark future is awaiting our descendents and us.

Religions, which were largely set aside because they didn’t follow our development, mainly in the last two centuries, were replaced by faith in science and technology.

What will happen if people will largely embrace the current idea, advocated by many, if not most scientists – especially in the AI field -, that we are merely machines?

In fact, what we are presently seeing everywhere in terms of social and individual decay may very well be consequence of that view of the world.

The current philosophical trends in AI is due to the fact that they regard humans as pure physical systems or, popularly, machines.

I consider this view extremely dangerous, because if consistent it has to negate human freedom, responsibility and dignity, as well as the possibility of unselfish love.

We’re barreling toward a future that doesn’t take people into account.

The increasing computational power of modern computers has permitted the implementation of tasks that would have seemed almost impossible ten years ago.

Are machines going to reveal intelligent behavior, and replace humans in creative tasks?

Will computers exercise the same kind of thinking and feeling that humans do?

Will robots perform every task that humans do? Will they become indistinguishable from humans?

So far, no one is planning for any of these possibilities.

For instance, self-driving cars could improve safety, but also put millions of truck drivers out of work.

There are such strong financial incentives in using technology in ways that aren’t necessarily in everyone’s interest. The App world for example. Algorithms manipulate the Stock Exchange.

To get any sort of regulation, to monitor Artificial Intelligence so its benefits all humans not just the Capitalist world of greed at any cost is going to be a very difficult problem, possibly an unsolvable problem.

Humans have already relinquished many intelligent tasks, such as the ability to write, navigate, memorize facts or do calculations.

Humans have continuously redefined intelligence and transferred those tasks to machines. Now, even tasks considered at the core of humanity, such as caring for the elderly or the sick, are being outsourced to empathetic robots.

The question is, could we evolve ourselves out of existence, being gradually replaced by the machines?

I think that’s an open question.

We’re becoming like the mitochondria. We provide the energy — we turn on the machines.

Whether humans and robots fight or make love, the most probable scenario involves marching toward a convergence point in the future.

On one hand, humans continue to add more technological gizmos and tiny computers to their daily wear.

You can already see many such 21st-century cyborgs playing around with their iPhones, or staring off into the distance with ear buds piping music into their heads.

Artificial limbs, organs and bionic eyes? Check.

Coming from the other direction, robots have steadily improved in almost every possible way: walking, talking and learning. Man and machine increasingly look-alike, and at some point the difference may not exist.

But on a brighter note, humans won’t worry so much about robots once they’ve merged with them.

Modern humans have not gone obsolete just yet, but robots have already found their place as space explorers that can endure harsh environments off and on Earth.

They have also brought their tireless efficiency to everything from assembly line work to humdrum gene sequencing in labs, and have appeared in growing numbers on real-life battlefields.

For now, robots complement rather than replace elements of the human workforce and armed forces due to limits on their intelligence. But they’re evolving quickly, and a few have even begun tinkering with science themselves.

Thousands of drones and ground robots have been deployed by many nations, and particularly the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. An automatic antiaircraft gun killed human soldiers on its own when it malfunctioned during a South African training exercise.

While AI nerds aren’t wondering if humans will ever make love to robots — armed robots are changing the rules and ways of modern war.

Meanwhile, plenty of people have enhanced their bodies technologically in ways that bring them closer to their robotic brethren.

If history serves as any guide, you don’t need the perfect partner to tempt spouses or significant others into a little robotic addiction and strain existing human relationships. Humans will eventually relinquish most of their abilities and gradually become absorbed into artificial intelligence (AI)-based organisms.Whether you are talking to a computer program or a real person. Some believe the resulting technological singularity will eradicate poverty and disease, while others warn it could endanger human survival.

Blame the human brain for allowing all of this to happen.

Can machines think?’

I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

We will have a machine is capable of intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.

The problem of machines having intelligence, that is, if there may exist an artificial intelligence, obviously depends on the adopted concept of intelligence.

Obviously, computers, as any machine, have an incorporated intelligence.

But they cannot have creative intelligence.

At the moment they do only what they are commanded to do by their programs.

Making machines become conscious is considered one of the hardest problems of Artificial Intelligence.

Every intelligence that requires feelings, like the interpersonal (Goleman’s emotional) and musical (related to art),cannot be incorporated into a computer.

The same applies to the intelligences that require self-consciousness.

I cannot see machines self determine their next thought like humans do.

There is much more evidence that humans are not machines. How is it possible to “store” something, forget it and suddenly, without “consulting” our memory, remember it?

Computers don’t learn, they store data.

The 20th century was really what I call “the century of barbarism”.

Intuitive social sensitivity, seems also to be disappearing.

Nowadays humans are abandoned, left alone to decide what to do with themselves.

But all those tragedies were, I think, based upon the idea that humans – or at least part of humanity, the enemies or those of another ethnic group, faith or ideology – were just animals.

One way or the other unfortunately we are miserably failing, mainly because we are not recognizing what a living being really is, what being human really means and what human development should mean. I’ll give an example of this situation.

The current scientific view of sickness is that they have to be eradicated, all of them. But another view of the human being could tell a complete different story: sicknesses are needed for a true individual development.

New social organizations that are based upon materialism cannot produce the essential changes we are in urgent need of, because Artificial Intelligence ignores the essence of the human being:

The fact that it has non-physical constituents.

As a consequence it has to ignore the possibility of exercising unselfish love, which is obviously socially constructive, whereas egotism is destructive.

There are forces which want to avoid the recognition that materialism has to be overcome. Strong and weak AI are part of their manifestations.

I think this has to begin by radically changing the view humans have of themselves and of living beings, the view that they are machines.

Unfortunately, academic AI has not contributed to that change, on the contrary, it has contributed to denigrating the image humans make of themselves. It has contributed to the elimination of our human dignity and social responsibility.

The way AI (robotics), genetic engineering and nanotechnology are being developed, self-reproducing machines may be introduced that will destroy the world.

I hope these lines have helped those that are searching for a more responsible science, to become conscious that strong and weak AI are not the fields that should be investigated in order to improve humanity. On the contrary, if pursued, those fields will only contribute to accelerate our increasing misery. Our main problems are not material problems. Only by solving our main problem, derived from what I characterized as the “fundamental existential hypothesis” that is, the way we regard ourselves and the world, we will be able to revert our increasing social, individual, and the world’s downfall.

What is a robot?

It is a mechanical device capable of interacting with its environment; it is a shell for an artificial intelligence; it is a machine that can autonomously perform an assigned task.

But it’s also much more than this, something that escapes baseline definitions and has fascinated humanity for centuries.

Robotics is at a crucial point in its evolution, an interesting and exciting time during which it’s coming to terms with a number of technical, practical and even philosophical issues.

We will record this key moment in history when robotics no longer belong to science fiction, but to contemporary reality.

The robots we design will change the world!

The goal of robotics should not be to replace humans with robots, but rather to improve productivity and safety, removing humans from harm’s way and enabling them to focus on things that humans should be doing.

Despite persistent fears regarding robot overlords, we will be as free

as we choose to make ourselves. We can do this not by fighting with

robots but by fighting fiercely to maintain our distinctness and our

essential nature.

Its now or never that we establish A world Technology Center that ensure all technology with profit at its heart, is transparent, responsible, and created by non unanimity but traceable ownership – beneficial to all.

It’s very good writing! Actually, I couldn’t decide about commenting after your words, “All human comments welcome”, my Earthling friend. :) By the way, I have wrote a post about similar subject today, if you want to read.